Image by westher via Flickr

Most of us work, and, counting commute time, dodging trucks, sliding on ice in winter, sun-blinded in summer, we probably put in a good fifty hours a week. I don’t even include the happy road warriors who scrunch up in the dark corners of an airport by a battered electrical output, twisted around in hard plastic chairs, banging away at the laptop, wanderers who spend all their traveling time reading impenetrable documents and scribbling notes. These are the same guys who make our life a misery on the highway, as we try to second guess them while they conduct an important business meeting via cell-phone at seventy miles an hour. It’s not their fault, they have to work this way. The 12-hour day they put in at the office is in no way sufficient to get the job done.

Catch me doing that! You would have to be quick. I dropped the first laptop I was issued, and lost the second. And, after 5 years, I haven’t yet figured out how to pick up my messages on the cell phone, or drive and talk without bringing an entire freeway full of cars to a screeching halt. Still, I’m sitting forgotten in a corner right now, pretending to program your computers, so don’t laugh too loudly; your lights may fail, your water supply may dry up; your paycheck might end up in some African village, framed on the wall of the witch doctor’s hut.

I’ve been a transient, gypsy, a nomad, never settling down, a few years, months, weeks, and I move on. I earn good money, meet a lot of bright people. The kids have grown up straight and true, hardworking, honest. My wife is a good homemaker and a great cook. People ask us why we don’t settle down, own a big house, a fancy car, join a country club, visit Paris for a week, holiday in Rome, London, Amsterdam. I earn good money, I could do that. Sometimes I do. In fact, My wife and I are tourists as often, or more often than most folks. People miss the point. Yes, I’m a Nomad, but I wander the most exciting continent in the world, actually, two of the most exciting continents in the world.

I’m not a tourist, in a place for a week, taking in the sights. Usually we live for months and years in a place that pleases us. We know the small pleasures of a city, away from the hotels. We know the traffic patterns, the seasons, the quiet places, the noisy places and the back alleys. We know where not to go. We move from City State to City State, crossing the continent and back again. We travel like Heads of State, receiving the keys to a hundred cities..    

I’m the consummate contractor, Jack of all trades, flitting from one job to another, pausing only to produce another botched-up system that will have to be straightened out by the happy, overworked road-warriors. Naturally, I’m unfulfilled and discontented with this parasitic existence. Why have I been doing this for the last 30 years? Why have I been working at a job that I’m not all bright-eyed about. I guess it’s because, inside the huge, small, old, new, gleaming, crumbling, cubicle-crammed workplaces I’ve spent time in, I got a lot of laughs along the way.